Fabulous Rome

I arrived in Rome at lunchtime on Sunday and it was raining. It had been lovely in Florence when I left and started to rain just as the train was entering the suburbs of  Rome. I decided to walk to the hotel rather than try and sort out the metro system with all my bags. I would have had to walk for 10 minutes from the nearest metro station anyway and I figured that I wouldn't get much wetter anyway. It took about 40 minutes to walk with my bags and the rain eased off not long after I left the station.

I spent the afternoon in the hotel because it continued to rain on and off. I did my washing and had a long shower and that was about it. There weren't any non-Italian channels on the television so I couldn't really watch it. There was one music channel but it seemed to consist mostly of silly Italians going on and on about something.

Vanessa arrived at about 9.30 and we pretty much went to bed because we were both tired. We got up early the next morning to try and come up with a game plan to see Rome in three days. We decided to start with ancient Rome, move onto the Vatican on Tuesday and then hit the rest of the sights on Wednesday, leaving us with Thursday morning to see anything that we missed.

We walked into town (about 3 km from the hotel) and arrived at about 10am. We entered the centre of the city through the Porta Pia which is just north of the train station. It isn't anything special and is in desperate need of a clean. We continued down the street and went to the Church of St Maria della Vittoria which is pretty ordinary on the outside but is the full baroque wedding cake on the inside. It has a great statue of the Ecstasy of St Therasa which is very interesting. It was done by Bernini and he clearly had some views on her story as well. She had a 'religious experience' that involved being penetrated by an angel. We walked past a large fountain and down to the Republic Square which is huge and has another fountain in it (they aren't big on water saving in Rome). St Maria degli Angeli is the large church on the square and it doesn't look like much from the outside either. The facade is mostly old bricks and looks a little unloved but the inside of the church is stunning. It is huge and in the shape of a large cross. It has heaps of space and light. There are some unusual modern sculptures but mostly the decoration is baroque.

The next stop was Santa Maria Maggiore which is one of the main churches in Rome. It is really full on inside with multicoloured marble and gilding and mosaics. It's huge with lots of lavish side chapels and interestingly confession in at least 10 different languages (so there is no excuse for not going!).

We walked down the road a little further to San Giovanni in Laterano Square which is home to another couple of important churches. The first one that we visited was the Scala Santa which contains the steps from Pontius Pilate's house that were brought to Rome in the 4th century by St Helena. They are now covered by wood to stop them from wearing but there are patches left bare where you can see blood stains. You aren't allowed to walk up the steps but have to go up on your knees, saying a prayer at each level. Luckily, there are another couple of staircases on the sides that you can just walk up to get to church. Otherwise some people would have to come to church an hour and a half early. The chapel at the top of the stairs used to be one of the private chapels of the Popes before they got the Vatican. It used to contain lots of relics but they have been transferred to the Vatican now. The only one remaining is a painting that was done by a non-human hand. I think that an angel is meant to have painted it through the hand of St Luke. You can't see much of it anyway because they made a protective silver cover for it a long time ago. We didn't go into the church because mass was on.

Across the road is the huge San Giovanni in Laterano church which is another of the main churches in Rome and has an attached seminary. The facade is all white marble and columns and is very imposing. It has a lot of statues and mosaics and is less OTT than Maria Maggiore which is nice.

We headed further up the street towards the Colosseum and stopped at the Basilica of San Clemente which has gorgeous mosaics from the 12th century. Interestingly lots of the tombs on the walls from the 19th century have inscriptions in English. We didn't pay to go into the ruins underneath the church but instead headed to the colosseum.

This was where we found all the other tourists in Rome because we hadn't seen that many in the churches. There was quite a long queue to get into the arena as well as crowds in the square outside. We decided to grab some lunch first and went to the supermarket in the backstreets behind the colosseum. One of the few public toilets in Rome is next to the Colosseum as well. It smells from the outside but is pretty good inside. It is also free which is a bonus. It is worth going before you leave as there aren't many other toilets around.

After our lunch of bread and cheese, we headed down to the colosseum again and decided to go with a tour. They were 21 euros per person and included the admission fee to the Colosseum and the Palatine. It was actually a pretty good deal because the audioguides to the Colosseum were 4.50 and there weren't any for the Palatine and neither has a great deal of signs or explanatory information. It is worth trying to get on earlier tours though at this time of the year because you are left to wander around in the palatine after the tour and because it closes an hour before dark, you don't get long if you join a tour after 1.30pm.

The guide that we got was really good and we got to wear groovy little one way walkie talkies so that we could hear him talking while we were walking around. The Colosseum wasn't known as that originally and got its name in the middle ages when there was a really large statue next to it. The statue was originally of Nero and had stood on the hill across the square but after Nero died they chopped the head off and made a new one. Later on they moved the statue to next to the Colosseum because they needed the space to build a temple on the hill.

The Colosseum was built in less than 9 years in the 1st century AD which is pretty impressive (though slave labour does make it easier). It was opened in 80 AD with 100 days of games for the general public. It wasn't completely finished at that stage as the section under the stage hadn't been built yet. Initially they could remove the floor and flood the area underneath it to have mock sea battles using dinghies. But they had another better venue with an artificial lake to use for these so they stopped bothering and built more stuff under the floor instead. They had a morgue, storage rooms, rooms for getting dressed in the armour and animal enclosures underneath. They had a complicated system of pulleys and counterweights that opened the trapdoors in the floor and enabled the animals to be brought up to the main arena. And we aren't talking little animals here, we are talking hippo sized things.

The floor was covered with sand to absorb the blood and this was changed several times during the games each day to stop the place from smelling too much. There was a cover over the entire arena that was put up and down several times a day to let the smell out as well. It meant that no-one had to sit in the sun. There were pulleys and ropes attached to the ground outside the arena and it took 240 men to put it up and take it down. Some of them had to climb up the ropes and onto the material at the top which would not have been a popular job.

The public entered the arena through 76 gates around the outside and tickets just had a gate number marked on them and then you choose your set from there. They could fill the arena with the full 60,000 people in just over 10 minutes which is impressive (I'm sure that the men with whips that herded the proles in may have helped though). It makes the people at the MCG seem disorganised.

Over the years, most of the marble has been removed to build other buildings in Rome (mostly churches and the Vatican) so there is little of the seating left and most of the building is just the brick framework from the underneath. They also stole a lot of the metal that had been used to put the stones together and make the building to some degree earthquake proof. This meant that by the 15th century it was not so stable and a large part of the southern side of the arena collapsed. At that stage lots of the area under the arches was being used as shops and apartments, but they all moved out after the walls started to collapse. It was pretty much left alone for a few more centuries after that until they realised that it could be a tourist attraction and started to look after it. They have now built brick stabilising sections in the broken area to stop further collapse and have re-earthquake proofed the rest of the building to some degree.

It was used as an arena for nearly 500 years in total and during that time it is estimated that 1 million men died in the games. Emperor Commodus (the nasty dude from Gladiator) is said to have killed 100 himself in the one day. He was keen on dressing up as Hercules with the lion skin and the club and beating men that were tied up to death. I feel that he was just slightly insane! The Romans must have felt that too because they ended up arranging for him to be murdered. Lots of animals died in the arena as well. They used to have competitions to see which animals were the tougher or just have a hippo and some hungry hyenas and other such fun things. One of the favourite half time activities was having hungry dogs chase a porcupine.

In the time that the place was deserted all sorts of interesting plants grew in the arena because of seeds brought in with the animals. It is really sheltered and warm inside the arena and there is a river running through under the old floor so there was plenty of water as well.

Interestingly enough there weren't many Christian martyrs in the Colosseum. That was something that was made up because it looked and sounded better. Most of them were crucified which is time consuming and fairly dull so was done in the middle of the Circus maximus instead while the chariot races were on.

We had about 20 minutes after the tour to walk around and take some photos of the arena before heading out to join another guide in a trip to the Palatine. You can join another tour if you want to have more time in the Colosseum but ours was the last tour for the day so we didn't have much choice.

The Palatine is where the first emperors of Rome built their palaces and is also the site where the city was founded in the 8th century BC. It is pretty much just ruins now but you can see how big it was. It was built with bricks covered with a thin layer of marble (now all missing) as it was quicker to build that way. The building was 5 storeys high with 2 level under the ground and 3 above. There were courtyards with gardens and fountains as well. Not all of the underground sections have been investigated yet because of collapses over time and a few months ago they found a new room covered in mosaics.

There is a little mini arena where they used to have mini chariot races with children and either ponies or goats. The back terraces over look the much larger Circus Maximus which is completely destroyed now. It was a giant marble arena that could seat 270,000 people and was used for chariot races. It is the one in the movie Ben Hur. There is nothing left now but a depression filled with grass that people use to walk their dogs and play soccer. The marble was also pilfered over the centuries and it is incredible that they didn't build something in the space at some stage.

Mussolini had a house on the hill as well because he wanted to live where the emperors did and it is now the museum which houses the remaining statues and other important finds from the area.

The story of the founding of Rome is interesting. It's said that a small number of the survivors of Troy came to Italy and founded a village near Rome. They had vestal virgins like Rome and one of them got pregnant. She was a smart cookie and came up with a story that she'd been raped by Mars so that they wouldn't bury her alive. She gave birth to twins, Remus and Romulus and the people of the village put them into a basket and let it drift down the river. It's said that the basket washed up near the current site of Rome and they were cared for by a wolf that had lost her own cubs. Interestingly at the time the word for a she-wolf and a prostitute was the same but the Romans decided to go with the wolf motif (sounds better). Anyway, the boys grew up and wanted to found a city of their own. They couldn't decide which hill to use and Romulus ended up killing his brother and forming the settlement on the Palatine hill. There are still some ruins of the original settlement that were found under the Roman buildings.

Interestingly only 5% of the tourists to Rome actually go up onto the Palatine Hill and it is really worth a visit. It is included in the ticket to the Colosseum and is only a couple of minutes walk away. Even if you just go up for the views over the forums and the city it is worth it. And even though it is called a hill, it is really not that hard a walk up to the top of it.

We got a little time to wander around the ruins before it closed and there are several viewing platforms with great views over the city. I hadn't realised how hilly Rome is. I knew that it had the hills but not quite so close together. It doesn't seem too bad when you are walking around though. After the Palatine closed we walked up into town a bit to look for somewhere to have something to eat. The Italians eat late so lots of the restaurants don't open until after 7.30pm but we eventually found somewhere that was open and had some pizza. We then walked back to the hotel. All up we walked for about 7 hours of the day and probably covered 18km or so, so we were tired when we got back to the hotel and went straight to bed.

We headed out early to get to the Vatican before the crowds arrived. We decided to catch the Metro because the Vatican was on the other side of town from the hotel and it is really cheap (just a couple of euros with a change of train lines). Of course it was peak hour and the trains were absolutely packed and we had to squish into a carriage. Thankfully lots of people got off in the first couple of stops after Termini and we even had seats by the time we got to the vatican. The stops are really well signposted and there are lots of signs in the station telling you were you need to go to get to the Vatican.

We arrived and walked to the Vatican museums from the station. We passed a Carige bank (listed on the American Express website as the place to cash their travellers cheques for no fee) but unfortunately it was closed until 11.30 so again I could get no money. Lucky that Vanessa was with me and could lend me some because the card people were taking ages to put the money through for me and I didn't want to have to pay 14% commission to change it at most of the change places in Rome.

When we got to the museum we found a bit of a queue but it was misleading because as soon as we got around the corner and into the building the queue disappeared. I think that it was just the bottleneck of security plus a tour group or two. We headed straight upstairs to the individual ticket line and walked straight up to the counter. It's 13 euros to get in and it is worth every cent. You then head further upstairs into the museum itself and this is where you can get audioguides in a multitude of languages. It's six euros a set and they are really worth it. There is a little introduction to each section of the museum (complete with overly loud and dramatic music) and then there are further sections on individual objects within each room.

The museum is a total maze and it is very easy to become disorientated. You do somehow walk in a giant loop though because you finish only metres from where you started and occasionally you will catch a glimpse of where you have been through a window or a door. They are very big on you going in the right direction, with the sheer volume of visitors each day they have to be. So if you get all the way to the chapel, they don't encourage you to then come back through the rest of the museum. So see things that you want to straight up and be done with it. No matter how early you arrive, there are going to be heaps of other people in the Sistine chapel and you can't take photos in there anyway so it's not like it matters that much. You can take photos in the rest of the museums but you can't use flash in some rooms. They are clearly signposted at the start of the section.

There are lots of tours in the vatican and as you walk from the station to the museum, you will get harassed by lots of people trying to get you to go on one. The ones that we were offered were around the 30 euros mark which is a lot and they last about 3.5 hours. Given that you can get the audioguide and the ticket for 19 euros and then go at your own pace and see what you want to see, I think that it is the better option. The tours usually include St Peter's as well, so you end up getting only a couple of hours in the museums. Vanessa and I spent nearly 4 hours and still could have spent longer if we had time. In winter the museums close early (last entry at 12.30 and closed at 1.45) so you don't have time to dawdle even if you do get there early. The tour people were telling us that the individual visitors aren't allowed into the museum until 10am but we were in around 9.30 and there were people in ahead of us, so don't believe them.

The museum starts with the Egyptian section that was mostly brought to the Vatican in the 19th century but a couple of Popes with an interest. It's quite a good collection and they even have a couple of mummies and a lot of statues. Some of the statues had been pilfered from Egypt by the Romans in the first couple of centuries, as garden decorations and were found in the ruins of villas in the 16th century. Others were Roman copies of Egyptian statues. The rooms have been decorated in mock Egyptian style though the Italian influence is obvious.

Next in the collection is a collection of Roman and Greek statues and busts. There  is a long gallery lined with them and at the end of it is a special section with funerary monuments and plaques from the early Christians and Roman pagans. You can only enter this section by special appointment unfortunately. You can see a bit of it through the glass doors though. To the side of this section is the Braccio Nuovo which also contains lots of statues, though, on a slightly grander scale. The hall itself is also quite impressive. Lots of the statues in this section were stolen by Napoleon in the early 19th century but were returned fairly rapidly by his successors. I guess that they didn't want to go to Hell with him!

It's got some really lovely work including the Nile (see photo of reclining dude with the little angels) and one of the most popular garden statues of the early first millennium which was found in over 70 villas in Rome alone. It is a copy of a Greek statue. Next you get to go outside into the Cortile della Pigna which is named after the large bronze pinecone that is sitting on the dais at one end. It is large and it is greenish and really didn't fuss me that much. There is a much more interesting looking modern sculpture in the middle of the courtyard that is shiny and reflects the buildings around it. There are lots of sculptures around the courtyard, but Vanessa and I were wary of the time and headed on into the next section instead.

The Museo Pio Clementino is the next section of the museum and it contained a lot of statues again only these ones were separated into sections on themes. There is a large octagonal courtyard which contains some of the larger statues including the one of the man wrestling the snake that is on the tickets for the museum. There is a great pair of two boxers that it is worth listening to the audio guide about. The two boxers were said to be so equally matched that when they were fighting neither could beat the other. So one of them stabbed the other in the belly with a sword. The referee thought that this was probably cheating and declared the dead man the winner. Very odd and why would you make it into statues. The courtyard also seems to contain a large number of marble bathtubs which are an odd thing to collect as most of them are fairly plain and ordinary.

There are several rooms of statues of animals with a definite leaning towards things killing other things and then some more statues and busts of Romans and greeks. These rooms also have some great mosaics that were moved from other buildings over time.

The Hall of Tapestries is quite dark to protect the work and contains a number of large tapestries on various religious themes. They were mostly made in the 16th century to designs by famous Italians. Many were made in the Netherlands though. They are really in very good condition compared to some that I have seen.

The next section is the Hall of Maps, which is painted with maps of all the regions in Italy and the church's possessions in each area. It is not the most interesting of the sections and I think that the ceiling is more interesting than the walls.

The Raphael rooms are the highlight of the museum. He was only 25 when he was commissioned by the Pope to decorate a suite for him. Each Pope liked to have his own set of rooms and unfortunately this often meant destroying the artwork of the previous occupants. Raphael's master had painted some of the rooms previously and in all but one room, the work was removed from the walls and destroyed. Raphael spent 8 years working on the rooms and died before they could be completed. The final section was painted by his students from the designs that Raphael had previously done. There are four rooms in the suite with two rooms painted by others but in a similar style.

The Sala di Constantino is the largest of the rooms and was mostly painted by the students after Raphael's death. The frescos depict various Popes and muses as well as several battles. The audio guide does tell you all about the stories but I promptly forgot most of it. The next two rooms are the ones that aren't part of the official Raphael rooms but are both quite interesting anyway. There is a chapel that was private for the Pope only and it has some interesting painting (what you can see of them anyway, the area is roped off and the door blocks a lot of the view). The Sala di Eliodoro is having work done at the moment so the main fresco that the audioguide talks about is covered over completely as well as some of the side wall as well. The statues painted on the lower part of this wall are incredible. The shadows are completely perfect. There is a great fresco of Leo the Great stopping Attila the Hun from sacking Rome, just by the power of his faith (and I suspect a large amount of money and other goodies!) What I found fascinating was that they have painted many of the main figures in the scenes with the face of another person. So the historical popes were all given the more recent Popes' faces and Socrates is pictured with the face of Leonardo da Vinci. How you are meant to work out who anyone actually is is quite beyond me.

The next room was mostly painted by Raphael himself. The frescos take so long to do because the paint has to be added while the plaster is still wet so you can only do very small sections at a time. This is the room with the large painting of the famous Greek and Roman philosophers, many with the faces of Raphael's contemporaries. The opposite wall has the church arguing over the sacrament.

The final room has the only work left from the previous decoration. Raphael kept the ceiling intact with the work of his master and made the rest of the room work with it. Most of the room was painted by the students and was also finished after his death.

From this room, you enter into the Borgia Apartments which were the home of another Pope and are now home to the museum's collection of modern religious art. The art is a bit ordinary but the rooms are great. They are also not very crowded as most people bypass the last section to go straight to the Sistine Chapel. They are worth going to see for the ceiling and wall decorations which are in a different style to the Raphael rooms but still lovely. It is nice to get a few moments of peace as well.

At the bottom of the stairs there are lots more rooms of the modern artwork but they are modern rooms and not worth going to see unless you want to look at the paintings. The art is quite obscure and it is hard to see the religious link in some of it. I think that the people just made up a story to get their work into the Vatican. There is one vast piece in the upstairs section of the museum that has a similar story. The artist gave up his large commission for the painting on the condition that it was shown to the Pope. The Pope liked the work and it was put into the Vatican straight away, thus increasing the value of the artist's other work.

You then go back up a large number of stairs to get into the Sistine chapel, where most of the people are congregating. You enter from next to the altar and then move back towards the rear of the church, exiting from a side door. There is an annoying guy going Shhh and no photos all the time but people seem to struggle with the signs that say Silence and NO PHOTOS! The chapel looks a little awkward to me. The walls have been done earlier than the ceiling and the front and were done by other artists and they just don't gel together properly. Both are fabulous artworks in their own right but just don't work together so well.

The walls were done by famous artists like Botticelli and Ghirlandaio and are much more appealing than the work of Michelangelo. They fit more with the rest of the work in the building also. Michelangelo's work was controversial at the time and are clearly masterpieces. They have much more emotion to them than the more traditional paintings on the lower walls. The ceiling covers Genesis, the prophets and sibyls and various ancestors of Christ. It also has a large number of buff nude blokes around the edges of the religious paintings. You can see why it would have caused a stir when it was unveiled.

They must have liked it though because 22 years later, they asked him back to paint the Last Judgment on the front wall of the chapel. He had to remove works that had already been painted on that wall and change part of his ceiling to make space for the painting and I think that this doesn't help the feeling of it being out of place. It was very obviously added later. It is a much more mature work than the ceiling and also caused quite a stir when completed. He was very radical having angels without wings and saints without halos and lots of nude people.

The centre of the work is a very large and very buff Jesus with a similar body to Adam from the ceiling He is next to the Virgin Mary and they are surrounded by various saints. Many of the saints are identifiable by the objects that they carry like St Catherine and her wheel. The best is St Bartholomew who is carrying a knife and his own skin. The bottom section is very graphic with the souls being carted off to hell. It is very striking but not very likable.

From the Chapel you enter into the Apostolic Library which has over 1.5 million books and manuscripts. They are all locked away elsewhere now and scholars only are allowed in to look at them. The general public just gets to look at where they used to be. It is a long corridor that is painted and lined with cupboards that used to contain the books. It is a really lovely space and nice and light after some of the dark, older sections. There are also nice views out some of the windows into the Vatican gardens that you can't normally visit (I think that they run one tour a week on Saturdays) and it is worth sticking your head out the window (some of them are open in this section).

The Salone Sistino has great paintings on the ceiling as well, but it is difficult to see them as it is used as a display space for temporary exhibits. At the moment it has a display of art about the Last Judgment and some interesting paintings from around Rome.

By this point we had somehow looped back to almost where we had started and handed in our audioguides. There are three more rooms past this section but it was getting late and we wanted to get out and see some more of the Vatican before the light faded. We had spent over 4 hours in the museum already.

We headed back down to the bank to try and change the cheques again and it was the strangest bank. Instead of having a normal door like banks at home, it had a little cubicle, that you entered one at a time and then the door on one side would close and the one on the other side would open. It was very 'beam me up Scotty!' The bank said that they didn't do traveller's cheques and directed me to the very expensive change office down the road so I didn't end up with any money yet again. We passed another bank (banca intesa who are also listed on the Amex site as being a place to switch for free) but it was a special 'no cash' bank. Isn't handing out cash a fundamental part of being a bank? It's like having a post office that doesn't do stamps or a pub with no beer! So still without any cash, I headed for St Peters.

We sat on the steps and ate our packed lunches. St Peters seems to be one of the few places in Italy where they don't seem to care if you sit around on the monuments and eat your lunch. The square is huge and has a large obelisk in the middle and two fountains on either side of it. The obelisk is covered in scaffolding at the moment though. There is a queue to get into the church (which is free) because of the security check that you have to go through. It does move quite quickly which is handy. On the other side of security there is a cloakroom and also some quite nice toilets which is handy to know in a city where they are in short supply.

On the way up to the church, we got to see some Swiss guards in their spiffy uniforms. They wear bright stripy pantaloons and funny hats. The outfits were supposedly designed by Michelangelo and you do have to wonder if he was taking the piss.

The church is incredible. You can see why the church had to strip ancient Rome of all its marble to build it. It is absolutely massive and full of huge statues of popes and saints and tombs and angels. Lots of it was made by famous artists of the 16th century and everything is on a grand scale. There are huge numbers of giant popes on the outer walls and saints on the inner ones and around the dome. Unfortunately there isn't anywhere in the church to light candles just a little side chapel where you can pray. One of the most famous works in the church is the Pieta by Michelangelo which is behind glass near the entrance. Vanessa didn't realise what it was at first and wondered why so many people were hanging around that statue and taking photographs (they don't really come out by the way because of the glass so just buy a postcard). We skipped the treasury as we have both seen plenty of shiny stuff before and while I would have liked to climb the dome it is 5 euros to walk up the stairs and 7 euros to take the lift most of the way and we felt that it was too much.

We walked down the Via della Conciliazione which runs from the Vatican down to the Tiber. We initially crossed on the Vittorio Emanuele II bridge which has some large statues and looked up the river at the Fortress and the Sant Angelo bridge. We then walked up and back across on the Ponte Sant Angelo which is the famous one that was built by Bernini. You can go into the fortress and it is meant to have good views from the roof but we didn't have time. It was where the Popes used to hide during times of crisis and has a secret tunnel through to the Vatican.

We headed into the maze of streets to the east of the bridge and wandered in the general direction of the Via del Corso. The streets are narrow and winding, lined with shops and restaurants. We finally came out in Piazza Navonne which is currently full of stalls for some sort of Christmas market. The large fountain in the middle is covered in statues and is currently being renovated (they are hoping to have it finished in January). We continued on through the streets (now wider and straighter) to the Via del Corso as we thought that it would be the easiest place to find a bank. Of course, when you are looking for one, you can never find one and we only had 15 minutes left because most of the banks in Rome shut at 4pm. In the end I went into a Travellex change place and asked how much their commission would be on euro cheques. They were much more reasonable at 8.5% for less than 200 euros and free for more than 300 euros (if you have amex cheques that is). So I changed some money and we headed off back towards the hotel. We stopped at a little place near the Spanish steps to have some gelati and then continued on the route home. We passed quite a few sights but decided not to bother stopping as we were coming back to this section of the city the next day and it was getting dark so you couldn't see things very well.

We walked around the suburbs near our hotel trying to find somewhere to have some dinner but of course nothing was open until 7 or later so we ended up in a snack bar having drinks for an hour or so while we waiting. After dark it is getting quite cold in Rome now so it isn't pleasant just hanging around. We headed down at 7.15 and grabbed some dinner at a restaurant called Braci e Abracci and it was a good meal though not cheap. I had a really nice ricotta based dessert called Neopolitan cake. We then headed back to the hotel and fell into bed exhausted again.

Wednesday was another busy day and we probably walked about 20 km for the whole day. We walked into town from our hotel and started at about 10am. We began with the Capuchin Monastery. Upstairs is a church Snata Maria della Concezione which is a fairly ordinary baroque number that is having work done on it currently. It is downstairs that the real attraction lines. Underneath the church there are a series of rooms that are decorated with the bones of 4000 dead monks. They were done between the 16th and 19th century using the bones of the monks already buried in the crypt. And it is not like they have just stacked the bones where you can see them or anything. They have made patterns out of them, all over the ceiling and the walls. Most of the skeletons are in pieces and they have used particular bones in particular rooms eg one has lots of sacrums and another scapulae. Vertebrae have been used in all the rooms but I guess they had a lot of them. There are a series of complete skeletons dressed in their robes still and some are almost mummified. They've been propped up so that they are standing in the niches made out bones. In the final room there are some really little skeletons that must belong to children. There is one on the ceiling that is holding the scales of justice (made of bones of course) and a scythe. I bought the postcard of that one. There are even little cherubs made of skulls with scapulae for wings. It is so strange that the monks would even have thought of it. I guess they had a lot of time on their hands.

From there we walked down to the Trevi Fountain, that is in a much smaller square than I expected. This makes it very difficult to take in the whole fountain at once or get any photos of the whole thing because you just can't get far enough away. The shadows are also a nuisance because of the tall buildings around it. I suspect that all the postcards have been taken out of the windows of one of the buildings. It is quite an impressive fountain nonetheless.

We headed down towards the forums again trying to get to the Piazza Campidoglio. We took a little bit of a wrong turn and ended up seeing more of the forums than we had planned but got there in the end. It doesn't help that the picture maps have the Piazza facing the wrong way so that the picture looks better on the maps. No wonder we had had trouble working out what was where when we were on the hill at the Palatine.

There is an impressive entrance up into one of the museums and there is the tomb of the unknown soldier on the first terrace of the steps and a statue to Vittorio Emanuele on the second terrace. The museum is an impressive classical building with horses and chariots on the roof. There are a couple of soldiers guarding the tomb and we got to see the changing of the guard at 11.30 but it wasn't anything special. Far and away the most dull of all the ones that I've seen done. We didn't go into the museum or up to the viewing points on its roof but headed down into town again and past the Piazza Venezia to the Church of Gesu. It is a huge white marble number with a massively impressive inside. It's the first Jesuit church in Rome and the founder lived in rooms off the church for many years prior to his death. The ceiling is just extraordinary  and was painted by Gaulli whose work shows up in churches around Rome. The figures seem to be completely separate from the ceiling and look three dimensional but in reality are flat. Unfortunately, they are working on the altar of St Ignatius as it has an extraordinary amount of lapis lazuli in it including the largest solid piece in the world.

We headed up to Santa Maria supra Minerva with a quick stop at the Church of San Giovanni della Pigna, which is a fairly ordinary little church. Outside the Church of Santa Maria is the Elefantino which is a really strange statue. It is of an elephant with an obelisk on its back. The obelisk is from the 6th century BC and the elephant is from the 17th century. I have no idea why they thought that they looked good together.

The church is quite large and has a statue by Michelangelo of Christ with the cross. The body of St Catherine (minus her head which is in Siena) is under the altar in the church as well.

Since we were right next to the Pantheon we thought that we would go there first before finding somewhere to have lunch. From the back, it is a grotty looking brick building but it looks much better from the front when you can see the columns. The current building was built in the first century AD by Hadrian but there was a temple there prior to that. It has the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome and they are still trying to work out how it stays up given its size and weight. The dome is over 40 metres across. Until the 16th century it was the largest dome of any kind in the world. The building was saved from ruin by its consecration as a church in the 7th century though some of the interior decoration was stripped for use in other churches. Inside is the tomb of Raphael as well as a couple of Italian kings. One of the kings is in a large purple porphyry box (one of the rarest types of marble). It's not huge so it is pretty quick to go around and see it all.

We walked down to a restaurant recommended in the LP for lunch, Bruscheteria degli Angeli and it was good. The serves were huge and we both struggled to finish. We then walked through to Campo di Fiori where there is a produce market in an old square. It wasn't that attractive so we didn't hang around long. We walked back up to Piazza Navona where they were continuing to set up the market. The large church in the square is closed for renovation at the moment so we just wandered through to the fountain at the northern end before detouring off the top of the square and to the parliament building which is very flash. We went past the Church of St Augustine but it was closed for lunch (most of the churches in Rome close from 12.30 to 4pm).

We went back to the Spanish steps which weren't anything special. They were covered in people and it was noisy and they aren't anything fancy architecturally either. We didn't bother climbing up them as Vanessa needed to go to the loo (that coffee at lunch was a bad idea) and we set off looking for one of them instead. They aren't easy to find really. We tried the metro station but they don't have toilets in them so we walked through the exit for the Villa Borghese thinking that there might be toilets in the park. The exit comes out (after a long walk) on Via del Galoppatoio in the middle of the park. We finally spotted a sign for toilets and after much walking found them on the side of the hill below the viewpoint over the square. They say that they are free but the little old lady looking after them asks for money. They are pretty clean though which is nice.

We walked down into the Piazza del Popolo where they were just tidying up after having filmed either a movie or an ad. There were lots of people around, tidying props up. There are a couple of nice fountains in the square and a large church but we couldn't go in because there was a funeral just starting. We headed down a street parallel to the river to the Mausoleo Augustus (a large pile of bricks covered in grass) and the ara pacis (an altar made by Augustus). I was looking for a large white altar like in the picture on the map but what you actually need to look for is a large white modern building which houses the altar. We didn't go into here as there were lots of school groups just entering. We looped back onto Via del Corso and headed back towards the hotel. We stopped briefly at an internet cafe to check email (it is about 3 euros per hour in most of the places in Rome). We had supermarket dinner after our enormous lunch and went to bed early.

We had an easy start on Thursday morning, as we were both tired and decided not to go into town again (the three km walk was off putting) and went to the nearby post office. The post office in Italy is quite bizarre. We had tried to go the afternoon before but had given up when the queue was moving so slowly that I could have hand delivered the post cards to Australia before getting to the top of the queue. You have to take a number and then wait until I flashes above the appropriate counter. Unfortunately the signs telling you which is the appropriate counter are all in Italian and given by the number of locals having trouble with joining the wrong queues, aren´t all that helpful anyway. We decided that the ones with the envelope over the top rather than the euro symbol were probably the ones that we wanted and joined them. The queue at this post office was moving faster because it had three women working it rather than two men, which was a start. Unfortunately after waiting for 10 minutes we found out that you can´t actually buy stamps at the counter with the envelope over the top, just send overweight letters and parcels. To get stamps you join another queue which doesn´t require you to have a number and which has filatelia written next to the envelope. This counter only sells stamps. So we joined that queue and finally got some stamps for our postcards. You need almost exact change for this counter too as they don´t really have any in the register (at least in this post office). How you are meant to do that when you don´t know how much it costs to send a post card to Australia I´m not sure.

After finishing at the post office we headed to a graveyard that is near to the hotel (Cimetero di Campo Verano). The entry is quite ordinary and the sections of wall graves but if you walk to the top of the hill there are some impressive mausoleums. They seem to be big on the little chapel looking thing with lots of angels on the outside. The place is crawling with cats that all seem to belong to someone was they are fat and shiny. One decided to walk around with us for a little while. It must have been lonely. It would be a good place to lounge around on a sunny day. We walked around for maybe half and hour before we had to head back to the hotel and check out. We then walked to the metro station and went into the city to Termini to catch the train out to the airport. We had lunch in one of the cafeterias in the train station and it was actually not a bad meal or too expensive. I had pasta and a salad for 5.30 euros. We also had our last Italian gelati before getting on the train. There is a train out to the airport every 30 minutes at 20 past and 10 to and it cost 11 euros. It seems to take forever given that it is an express and it isn´t that far to the airport. It took us at least 40 minutes. Once we were there, it was too early for Vanessa to check in (she tried but was told that she had to wait another 15 minutes) and I joined the long queue for mine. It didn´t help that there was only one woman doing checkin and lots of people around. Finally they roped in a second guy to help and it went slightly quicker. It was slowed down even more by the people with 111kg of luggage who took up the counter for nearly 20 minutes. Vanessa´s queue was worse though because she stood at the top of the queue for 30 minutes waiting for someone to start checkin. The staff were there but just sat around making phone calls and chatting. Lord knows what was wrong.

We headed through security and both jumped on the plane. Continue to read the next entry to hear all about Barcelona.